First it was Detroit versus Pittsburgh, Motown’s finest against Sid the Kid. The next year, there was the Rust Belt rematch and a seven-game classic.

Now comes a collision in the Stanley Cup final between two of America’s most passionate and historic sports cities.

Somebody in the Bettman administration must be saying their prayers at night.

The Windy City and the City of Brotherly Love, head-to-head, a matchup that Major League Baseball, the NBA or the NFL would embrace any time.

And the little NHL’s got it.

Sure, it’s too bad that Canada will go another year without a Cup champion, but my goodness, the Chicago Blackhawks and Philadelphia Flyers are just loaded with Canadian-born talent.

In a year in which Canada won Olympic gold in Vancouver, hoping one of six NHL franchises in the Great White North could win Lord Stanley’s chalice was probably getting a bit greedy.

But if the Leafs, Senators, Canadiens, Oilers, Flames and Canucks couldn’t make it, the Flyers and Hawks aren’t bad second choices, by gosh.

Philly, the NHL’s 18th-best team after the regular season, dressed 14 Canadians in Game 5 of the Eastern Conference final against Montreal on Monday night, the contest that ended the Habs’ equally unlikely charge through the post-season.

Joel Quenneville’s Blackhawks, meanwhile, have 2010 Canadian Olympians Duncan Keith, Brent Seabrook and Jonathan Toews on the roster, and dressed 12 other Canadians in clinching the Western Conference crown in a four-game sweep.

So, if the two rosters don’t change between now and Game 1 of the Stanley Cup final on Saturday, 29 of the 40 players dressed will trace their birthplaces to one of our 10 provinces.

Now that’s not bad.

Chicago, third overall in the regular season, will go into the final as a sizeable favourite, and so it should be. This is a club that has found its fan base didn’t die but was merely hibernating, and now has a team that learned some tough lessons in the last year’s playoffs and has applied them this spring.

Philly? Last fall, they were a sexy choice to represent the East. But they struggled through December, fired their coach, ran hot and cold all year, went through goaltenders like Don Cherry goes through “I told you so’s” and got into the playoffs on the last day through a shootout when John Tortorella decided Marian Gaborik wasn’t one of his best goal-scorers.

Then, they fell behind Boston 0-3 in the second round before coming back to become the third team all time to do so. Now they’re in the Cup final. Is this a Cinderella story or a team that acted all year like a snotty kid with a trust fund, only applying themselves when absolutely necessary?

Guess we’ll start really finding out on Friday.

The goaltending matchup, Antti Niemi against Michael Leighton, is about as improbable a battle of masked men as could have been conjured up by the most imaginative hockey fan 10 months ago. The two captains, Toews and Philly’s Mike Richards, were linemates on the checking line that Mike Babcock constructed for Team Canada to use against Alex Ovechkin and the Russians in a stunning Olympic triumph in February.

Both teams, meanwhile, have players capable of driving the opponent to distraction. Chicago might be the yappiest team in the game with Adam Burish, David Bolland, Kris Versteeg and Dustin Byfuglien. The Flyers will counter with Scott Hartnell, Ian Laperriere and Chris Pronger, plus Dan Carcillo if he can get in the lineup again.

So the storylines will be plentiful. From a larger perspective, in a year in which the NHL found itself constantly battling awful publicity from one of its weakest franchises, the Phoenix Coyotes, Chicago and Philadelphia have asserted themselves as two of the NHL’s flagship teams.

To be honest, Philly has been that pretty much since joining the league in 1967. Chicago re-emerged three years ago, hosted the Winter Classic and packs the once mausoleum-like United Center with 22,000 fans most nights.

It should be a terrific series to conclude what has been one of the most dynamic and exciting sets of Stanley Cup playoffs in some time.

And the winner is? Hawks in six. The drought ends at 49 years.

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